Inspiron 1464 mystery

[ell]

Does the motherboard have a NEC Tokin chip on the reverse of the motherboard directly under the CPU?

I've had this problem numerous times on Toshiba and Acer laptops with the exact symptoms you are explaining. You'll probably find that if you use the laptop ONLY on a battery and NOT powered with the AC power supply plugged in it will work OK and fully boot into windows and behave normally, but as soon as you plug in a mains power supply you'll get the laptop freezing and not working.

If it has this NEC tokin cap on the board it is a well known problem with this cap failing after a period of time, the most common fix is to remove this cap and replace with 4 smaller caps.

I've carried out this fix successfully on a number of laptops, you really need a hot air station to help with removal of the existing NEC Tokin as it is a bit of a pain to remove from the board.

If you haven't already written off the laptop and still have it in your possession and the time to test, it would be interesting to see if it runs OK just on battery power.

yea, I don't have the tools for that, or I would check it out. the battery is totally worthless unfortunately.

 

[kestral]

Shame about the battery being shot as that isolates the problem with the Tokin chip, as you find they run fine on battery power but fail and freeze as soon as mains power is used.

 

[ell]

Shame about the battery being shot as that isolates the problem with the Tokin chip, as you find they run fine on battery power but fail and freeze as soon as mains power is used.

It did work beautifully in safe mode even with networking, weird.

 

[kestral]

It certainly points to it have one of these NEC Tokin as it behaves just like the laptops I have fixed in the past. I've found this little list of potential troubleshooters/possible help in my files that I found when originally troubleshooting this issue, it may help you out as these are just configuration settings rather than an actual hardware fix, could be worth a shot to see if you can get it running in 'normal' mode, people have had success with these settings in the past.
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Check if your Laptop works in Safe Mode. If, yes then you have to replace NEC/TOKIN Proadlizer capacitor which is located at the bottom of the processor. But without replacing the problem can be fixed by one of the following ways -

1. In SafeMode Go to control panel--> device manager---> go to processor----> disable one of the two processors --> reboot normally. If not working disable both processors.

2. You Change the Power Saver to High Performance in Windows 7 or 8.1 and the problem fixed. Click start at left bottom of your computer. In the search box type Power. Click Power Options. Change Balanced to High Performance by ticking it.

3. If the problem persists, disable one of the two CPU cores in the BIOS setup . To enter Bios Restart computer and before it boots ckick F2 continously. If it doesnt work , again restart the computer and try with F8 , F10, Delete, F4 ,etc. You may have to initially disable one of the processor cores in BIOS to get the laptop to boot up past the Power-on self-test (POST).

4. Click Start. In the search box type 'services'. Click services. At the right hand side of the services box, click on power. Under the general category change ''Start up type' from Automatic to Disabled. Click apply -Ok. Restart your computer and the problem is fixed.

 

[ell]

It certainly points to it have one of these NEC Tokin as it behaves just like the laptops I have fixed in the past. I've found this little list of potential troubleshooters/possible help in my files that I found when originally troubleshooting this issue, it may help you out as these are just configuration settings rather than an actual hardware fix, could be worth a shot to see if you can get it running in 'normal' mode, people have had success with these settings in the past.
----------------------
Check if your Laptop works in Safe Mode. If, yes then you have to replace NEC/TOKIN Proadlizer capacitor which is located at the bottom of the processor. But without replacing the problem can be fixed by one of the following ways -

1. In SafeMode Go to control panel--> device manager---> go to processor----> disable one of the two processors --> reboot normally. If not working disable both processors.

2. You Change the Power Saver to High Performance in Windows 7 or 8.1 and the problem fixed. Click start at left bottom of your computer. In the search box type Power. Click Power Options. Change Balanced to High Performance by ticking it.

3. If the problem persists, disable one of the two CPU cores in the BIOS setup . To enter Bios Restart computer and before it boots ckick F2 continously. If it doesnt work , again restart the computer and try with F8 , F10, Delete, F4 ,etc. You may have to initially disable one of the processor cores in BIOS to get the laptop to boot up past the Power-on self-test (POST).

4. Click Start. In the search box type 'services'. Click services. At the right hand side of the services box, click on power. Under the general category change ''Start up type' from Automatic to Disabled. Click apply -Ok. Restart your computer and the problem is fixed.

Well I tried all those settings, nothing worked, there was no way to tweak the cpu in the bios either, oh well. :-(